


Breaking the spells

by tea_for_lupin



Category: Dark Is Rising Sequence - Susan Cooper
Genre: Angst, Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-10-05
Updated: 2014-10-07
Packaged: 2018-02-20 01:49:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 809
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2410553
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tea_for_lupin/pseuds/tea_for_lupin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Some time after Blodwen's 'death', John comes to understand something of the truth about who she really was.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Ties in with [Of meadowsweet and owls](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1219621): 'by lamplight [she] worked with thread and needle the spells to keep him blind. Mended shirts, and finer work: the cloths upon their table and the hangings on the walls. A thousand thousand stitches in her unseen net of flowers.'

When the shirt split at last, across his back, John was lifting a sheep into the truck. He felt it, the soft cloth parting and the spring air cool and sharp on his sweat-soaked skin. 

Half an hour later John sent the ewes on their way, slapped the side of the truck and called a cheerful farewell to Rhys Evans as he drove them off, back to Pentref farm. He loosed the kerchief at his neck, and mopped his brow, and then pulled the torn shirt over his head.

Not to be mended, now. He remembered Blodwen stitching up the seam beneath the arm when last it tore. So good a seamstress she had been, and she sang to herself, always, at her work: soft haunting melodies in a minor key, and John had never been able to catch the tune of them to replicate for her on the harp. He ran his fingers over the seam she had repaired, such neat fine stitches, scarcely to be felt under his rough hand. Grief caught at him, sudden and strong, and for a handful of heartbeats his breath was taken away.

'Eh, John,' David Evans said, walking up with a thermos, 'that old shirt has given up the ghost, then, and about time too.' He poured the tea, offered the battered metal cup.

John blinked, drew breath, was brought back. With a nod of thanks he took the cup, slung the shirt over his shoulder, and drank. The hot tea was thick with tannin, just this side of too bitter, as it always was when David made it himself. They drove back in the Landrover, quiet together in the fading light. 

Back at the cottage, John washed and changed, took up the shirt a final time. It would do for rags. The fabric came apart in his hands, with a hushed sound not unlike a sigh. He tossed it into the box beneath the sink.

That night he dreamt of a woman in white whose face he could not recognise, and they sat beside each other on a train that rattled and chattered through a tunnel, and the woman's hand was cold in his own.


	2. Chapter 2

'John, I am _so_ sorry,' Jen Evans said, distress written in lines across her face. 'So very sorry—I can't think how it could have happened.' In her hands she held a tea cloth, and towards one end of the cloth there was a large hole, almost triangular. Its edges were blackened and burned.

John took it from her, slowly, as she went on, 'I'd mended the hem, and I'd ironed it but left it on the board, and I was sure I had turned the iron off. I only left it for a minute to put the kettle on, but when I came back—' Her eyes met his, unhappy. 'I just can't understand it. Perhaps one of the dogs came in and knocked the iron over. But even so—'

John nodded, and threads flaked away under his fingers, leaving a red petal unravelled and scorched. 'One of the first things she made, this,' he said, and the words jerked out rougher than he intended, and somehow he did not know why. He patted Jen Evans' hand. 'Just after we were wed. It's old, Jen, it's all right. Nothing lasts forever, does it, and it has seen good days of use—twenty-five years and more.' 

When she left John remained there, standing with the ruined cloth half-crumpled in his hands, absently stroking his thumb over the raised smoothness of a leaf, satin-stitched. Then with a shock he felt that, too, crumbling to ash, and as he watched, astounded, across the whole work the embroidery began to turn black and fall away, stitch by stitch, as if it smouldered still, without heat. 

A ghost of smoke went up from the cloth, grey-white in a shaft of sunlight, and John's breath came suddenly fast in his chest; his hands shook, and he dropped the remnant of the tea cloth. It lay on the floor, nothing but a lace of white linen, now, every trace of colour eaten away. A horror was on him, heart-deep, and he could not bring himself to pick it up again.

Later, when he had eaten and smoked a pipe, John walked back into the sitting room and stared down at the tattered cloth; muttered, 'Get a hold of yourself, man,' and caught it up. Outside under a white moon he flung it up to the sky, and in an uprisen wind it broke apart and blew in fragments away across the darkened fields.

'Ah, Blod,' he whispered, 'what is this, what is this?'

In his sleep he dreamt he heard her calling his name— _John, John_ —but it was only an owl, flying past the window as it hunted through the dark.


End file.
